Note: Although the competition was in September last year, the Minister for Education formally awarded the competition winners yesterday, hence the media reports today.

"The University of New South Wales has dominated the federal government's Cyber Security Challenge for the third year in a row, with its teams beating out a record number of students to be awarded the top four places in the competition.

Coming in first place, with 2499 points, was the University of New South Wales team of Niel van der Westhuizen, George Caley, Adam Chyb and Genevieve Anne Carter.

The runners-up on 2181 points were Alyssa Besseling, Donny Yang, Oliver Tan and Glen Carmichael; while the team of Daniel Phillips, Nicholas Laver, Nicholas Whyte and Sean Yeoh came third with a score of 2070.

The highest-ranked team not from UNSW came from Monash University, which claimed fifth spot on 1647 points.

Each of the top three teams picked up four flights to Ruxcon and Kiwicon, with the winning team also picking up tickets to Defcon 2016, four Samsung Gear VR with Oculus headsets and four Samsung Galaxy S6 phones."

The Australian8 December 2015"CBA, UNSW team up to train cyber security experts”

Last week’s hack of the Bureau of Meteorology’s supercomputer is the latest publicised example of a cybercrime problem estimated to cost Australia $1 billion a year. UNSW cybercrime expert Richard Buckland said the threat was snowballing as the burgeoning network of connected organisations relied on computer managers with diminishing skills. You can find more information in the following links:

CSE team K17 placed 10th overall, 4th among undergraduate teams and 1st out of 35 Australian teams at the preliminary round of NYU Poly's annual 'Cyber Security Awareness Week' CTF (https://csaw.engineering.nyu.edu/ctf ; https://ctf.isis.poly.edu). This is the largest and the preeminent university based security competition in the world.